MIT students push for new record

A team of ten M.I.T. students powered a supercomputer for twenty minutes by pedaling bicycles in a bid to enter the record books for human-powered computing (HPC).

The SiCortex SC648 supercomputer with a Linux cluster of 648 CPUs and almost 1TB of main memory in a single cabinet is fairly low powered. It only needs 1,200 watts without needing special power supplies or cooling.

The SC648 chip, with six processors on it, also only needs eight watts. The ten students set up bikes on stands with the wheels driving dynamos to generate direct current power, which was converted into alternating current.

The supercomputer was running software which calculated a nuclear fusion reaction.